


Delusion

by violenteer



Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Post-Canon Fix-It, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-26
Updated: 2017-09-26
Packaged: 2019-01-05 21:44:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12197991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violenteer/pseuds/violenteer
Summary: In the aftermath of his time spent at Mount Massive, Waylon finds it nearly impossible to adjust back to civilian life. With only his sanity and strength to guide him, he is quickly lost, looking for the only thing that seemed to matter.





	Delusion

When Waylon climbs into the shower at night, he cries. It’s not a sad thing, or a small thing, or even a cathartic thing. The sobs are ripped from his throat as if they never belonged. He shakes the gray tiling surrounding him, he makes the glass door shudder, condensation escaping his glare. Waylon clutches his stomach where he was stabbed, and he cries.

 

His wife, Lisa, hasn’t been in contact with him for several months. She thinks that it’s best for everyone if she and the boys are far away from Waylon, and stubbornly, he has no heart to disagree. They are still young, and they think that he’s someone that may or may not be important. They don’t know him well enough, because sure, he got the job at Murkoff, but he’d been working at countless away-jobs for years. It was rare that Waylon came home. Rarer still that he and Lisa agreed, or even spoke.

 

It’s another reason why he’s racked with sobs in the middle of the night. Waylon’s family is gone and he doesn’t know how to miss them. Sometimes he screams for his wife hoping that she’ll run into the bathroom and ask him what’s wrong. Sometimes Waylon screams her name just to remind himself that they knew each other. Most of the time, though, his gasping breath is occupied by another name all together.

 

Eddie Gluskin. The Groom. The Man Downstairs. An inmate inside of Murkoff that, as far as Waylon knows, never made it out. Waylon calls for him the most, because he is the last person to have ever really touched him, the last person to have ever really understood what Waylon was seeing. In a twisted way, they saw eye to eye. Waylon can remember how the rope felt around his neck, squeezing until he heard his own spine pop from the strain. There were bodies just like his own. Naked, rotten, mutilated, forgotten. All men, and all hung. Waylon made eye contact with a few of them when he was looking for the key back to civilization.

 

We could have been beautiful. It goes through Waylon’s mind like water in a cracked roof, the words seeping down into the core of him. When he drops to his knees, when he feels pain shoot through his poorly-healed ankle, Waylon thinks of this. We could have been beautiful.

 

He thinks Eddie is still alive when the water runs cold over his shoulders. Waylon can feel the bruises and the fractures embed deeper and deeper in his skin. He can remember how hard and how long he ran. The glass and the nails that stuck into his feet. It’s a sick joke, but Waylon can’t stop the hysteria that ricochets around in his head, begs to be set free.

 

Lisa. Eddie. Blaire, and Murkoff. Miles. Eddie. Lisa, Tim, Jason. Around and around in his head these names swirl.

 

Sometimes, just so that he knows he’s still alive, Waylon reopens the wound in his stomach. He presses a razor’s edge in until red spews down the side of him. Like those words that run into him. And the rain that pelted down on his back when he was running from the drying ground to the vocational block.

 

Or, maybe that hadn’t happened. Had it? No, it was a leak. When he was trapped, before he knew he was trapped. Waylon presses his fingers into the wound now, digging easily at split flesh and squeezing his eyes shut so hard he gives himself a tension headache.

 

He shouldn’t have run. Waylon could have stayed within the walls, kept his head down, found an alliance or a truce or a brilliant place to hide where no one would find him and no one would touch him and he could keep talking to Lisa and it wouldn’t be so bad. It would have been easy to find that place inside ‘Massive. There was no shortage of crevices or cracks, little holes where the smallest of the inmates could fit and keep. Like non-perishables. Waylon could survive weeks on his own body weight. He could.

 

But it wasn’t even important, if he couldn’t.

 

Eddie Gluskin. Would he have taken care of Waylon? Waylon thinks of it, now. The sickly-sweet hand on his thigh, begging his attention and his willingness. Waylon had been struck so deeply by fear that he couldn’t make more sound than those small, raw animal noises. Like the ones he makes, now. Taken from him. Inhuman, involuntary. But he thinks that maybe that would have been okay, too.

 

If Waylon can feel those fingers, again. Smoothing scared, sweating skin. Keeping Waylon calm in the storm of his mind.

 

Waylon tries so hard to see Eddie that sometimes he thinks he can. Out of the corner of his eye, or twisting up and down the main hallway in the upper-class apartment he rents. That underground news conglomerate he went to with his videos and his manila files gave him more money than Waylon knew what to do with. He still doesn’t. Most of it is in a bank account he doesn’t touch. Waylon thinks about using it to find Eddie.

 

Sometimes he imagines sending half of it to his family. More than that. All of it, even. Everything he has just to be accepted, again. But Waylon knows it wouldn’t make sense to go back to his old life. He can barely keep himself out of this shower, most of the time.

 

The water is cold. His shoulders shake, but Waylon isn’t aware of it. Eddie. Eddie. Eddie. Waylon makes himself still, not touching a thing, not saying a word. He imagines the decaying walls, first. The mildew and the dry rot and the damned stench. That comes next, and usually, he can smell it, anyway. Sweat and blood and fear and piss and shit and mold and death. It culminates, it cultures. It becomes more than the sum of its parts. Waylon can’t gag on the smell, anymore. He wishes for it. It’s the walls and the smell, and then it’s the creaking. In and out, that creaking. Too loud, too high-pitched. Like the keening from a wounded animal giving Waylon away. He made a mistake when he walked down the stairs, but Waylon couldn’t just stop.

 

He sees it, he smells it, he hears it. And then Waylon feels it. Cold metal shoved up against his arms, trapping him. A grate that drips with mist, almost like chloroform. That bad feeling in his gut, the one that comes when he’s in too deep, and he wasn’t smart enough to carve out an escape route. Waylon feels that metal like loving hands. He inhales the mist, because he wants to sleep, but he knows he won’t. He can’t feel the shower water, anymore. Instead it’s sweat, and it’s all over. Cold sweat. Frozen in fear.

 

“Mmm,” he tries to say, but his jaw is clamped shut.

 

“Darling.” Waylon hears.

 

His heart thumps, out and out and out and out against his ribcage. Harsh and loud and maddened. Waylon feels something. Maybe it isn’t there but he can feel it and that’s enough. Calloused hands. Rough with hard work. The fingers curl around his thigh, burning him down to the bone.

 

“Such soft skin,” are the words in his head, begging to be voiced.

 

Eddie, Waylon thinks.

 

His phone is ringing somewhere far off, but Waylon can scarcely hear it.

 

He feels himself push forward, his head cresting the air right above him. As stale and stiff as it is, Waylon likes to feel the pressure lift. His neck strains, his chest is bruised with the heart that beats separate of his body. Waylon can feel his vision tunneling, but he forces himself to focus.

 

“You’re going to be beautiful.”

 

Waylon can feel the electrifying buzz of a table-saw that splits the gurney he’s laid out on in half. It shakes him like it shakes Eddie’s hand, skin vibrating, lips curved into a confident smile. It’s a fake smile, but Waylon thinks he could learn to trust it, really. His stomach is dropping and he’s trembling so hard that he can’t breathe. But Waylon needs this. Just one more minute of this, of this togetherness. So sweet, so close. Eddie wants him to stay, and Waylon was too afraid at first, but he thinks that maybe he can. He’s stronger than he gives himself credit for. He made it out, somehow. Maybe Eddie will see that, and maybe he will make sure to be extra careful and sew Waylon up as soon as it’s done.

 

“I want it,” Waylon says, choked.

 

He puts a hand around himself and squeezes, like he squeezes his eyes. He doesn’t like what this does to him, but he needs it. The flushing and the fullness. The need that steals him. Waylon can’t handle being this alone. Lisa is gone and his children are gone and that reporter he called out for is gone, too. All of them left him. Like ghosts in his head, they left him. Their memory remains, but Waylon can hardly remember what he ate for breakfast. Let alone how his wife’s smile looks in the sun or in the rain or in the moonlight.

 

But he can remember Eddie’s eyes, as crazed and lively as Waylon’s own determination. He moves, now, because he must surge forward to get himself from one memory to the next. The tile moves under his knees, making him sick, his stomach churning fast. Waylon thinks he’s going to throw up because he can feel the memory fading and he feels for that wound again. Stops, aims for his ankle instead. Twists until it’s bent unnaturally, the outside of his ankle made to kiss his other leg. Waylon wants to howl and he wants to laugh, too. He’s done enough and he’s done too much but he can’t stop.

 

“I try, and I try,” Eddie says to him, like he really wants him to pay attention.

 

Waylon can see the bodies. He remembers making eye contact, but everyone is sleeping. Everyone is dead. His face hurts, and Waylon flinches as he feels familiar knuckles kiss his cheeks and his chin and his eyes and his nose. His bones grind, and he coughs up blood after he’s bitten down too hard on his tongue. It happens then and now; cyclical. Waylon revels in the coppery taste no matter where he is. He tries to keep his feet on the ground but he falls and he can’t get back up even when freedom is so close.

 

But he doesn’t feel the rope, anymore. He feels someone behind him, guiding him away from the gymnasium. Waylon can make out the touch because it’s firm and it’s calloused and it won’t go away.

 

He snaps his eyes open and everything returns to the way it was. The fog in the shower is long gone, replaced by a clear shower stall and water like ice. Waylon untwists his ankle. He screams in pain and shakes his head rapidly in a poor bid to convince his fragile mind that nothing is wrong.

 

Nothing is wrong. Nothing is wrong. He needs to eat something. Waylon hasn’t yet and he needs to.

 

Outside there is a plush towel and lotion, because his eczema has come back with a vengeance with the fall and the winter, and he doesn’t want his skin to crack and bleed. He waits until his erection dies before stepping out of the stall. His limp is back. He smiles raggedly at his own reflection before pouring white goo into the palm of his hand and rubbing it mechanically over his limbs. It burns but Waylon doesn’t mind. There’s still blood pouring over his abdominal muscles. He can’t feel his toes.

 

There is a shadow that stalks past the bathroom and Waylon’s eyes shoot over to the door. He hopes to find Eddie there, but it must be a trick of the light. No one stops. No one waits. No one intrudes.

 

Waylon still has more lotion on his hands than he knows what to do with. It’s sticky and clogs his pores. He walks to his bedroom naked, not bothering to look inside his dresser drawers before finding pants and a shirt and quietly slipping them on. He’s still wet because somehow Waylon forgot to dry himself off. The lotion slips and slides over his skin, almost slimy. He toes the threshold of his bedroom, thinking of what could possibly be in his fridge.

 

The former programmer orders something, instead. He almost forgets to look through his phone, but when he does, he sees that he has two new messages and a missed call. No voicemail, no caller ID. An unfamiliar number looks back at him. Waylon looks at it for a moment, trying to parse out who could possibly have his number, and who would possibly dare to give a shit about him. His finger hovers over the ‘read messages’ option on his phone. Waylon tries to imagine Eddie Gluskin typing a casual text message into a smartphone and his brain short circuits.

 

Somehow, the phone is out of his hands and his face is shoved into a pillow and his throat is burning with the effort of yelling into the downy material. Waylon empties his lungs into the soft fabric of his pillow. He’s huddled into a fetal position for fifteen minutes before someone rings his doorbell. Food.

 

When the Thai is sitting on his kitchen counter, Waylon finally looks down at his legs. He’s wearing all black. He shakes his head again, violently wiping the memory of his wife in similar color, frowning at him and asking what their first should be called. Whether he should have a traditional name or something more creative. Lisa liked to wear black before the kids were born. It made her curly red hair stand out all the more, the freckles on her face like dark sharpie marker blotted into the skin. Striking and serious, but somehow comforting.

 

Waylon goes back to find his phone. He looks at the text message application again, and clicks, this time.

 

It’s easy to read the words on his screen. Somehow, Waylon doesn’t stop until the two messages are engrained into his mind like a mantra, haunting and all-important. He doesn’t expect this. Even though he’s told that he will be hunted, followed, never given true rest. Even though he’s seen the town cars that follow him from the city back to his place. Even though with him it’s always been a matter of time until the world falls out beneath his feet.

 

**Your work is not done yet, Mr. Park.**

**Find a way to Colorado soon. I will be in touch.**

 

They don’t make sense. They do and they don’t. Waylon has considered going back to Colorado for months, but he always thinks better of it in the morning. Even if he goes to the travel websites and almost checks out a hundred times. Even if he googles whether or not a man can survive impalement. Waylon has no business in Colorado anymore.

 

Except that he does, now. He bites his lip and then remembers the split in his tongue. Waylon swallows and opens the banana rolls, not bothering with coconut ice cream or sesame seeds or honey. He shoves the food in his mouth and down his throat, hot as it may be.

 

It has to be a hallucination. Waylon opens and closes the messages again to see if maybe they’ll evaporate, but they don’t. He persistently presses open and close again and again until his fingers cramp, standing barefoot in the center of the kitchen, smell of skewers and noodles and peanut sauce all around him. Nothing changes. It isn’t fake. It’s real and it won’t leave Waylon alone. He has so little to focus on these days that even the most inane thing becomes his entire life. There was a night when he focused on a lady bug that somehow found itself on his comforter. Waylon watched the thing crawl until the sun set and rose and then he cupped it in his hands and let it fly away, right out of his kitchen’s open window.

 

He wants to go back to Colorado. Waylon wants to see the mountains, again. He wants his ears to pop with the elevation, wants to hallucinate the dark spots a thousand times over. He remembers his head aching the first few weeks on the job at Murkoff. Waylon thought it was annoying, then, but now he desperately wants to feel that discomfort again.

 

It was easy to find a place on the map and stop there, but it doesn’t make sense, anymore. Chicago holds nothing. No family, no friends, no job, no purpose beside a good place to lay low. Waylon thought that it would be easy for him to blend into a new society, but he finds that the city lights and the brisk people make him miss his own town more. Make him miss the asylum more. Waylon doesn’t think he wants to live in the shadows, anymore. Not when they mean nothing to him.

 

When his phone rings again, it scares the shit out of Waylon. What could the message say, this time?

 

Flinchingly, he opens his phone. Waylon looks at his messages, but finds nothing more than the two in his folder from the unknown number. He squints and pulls down the news bar only to realize it was a virtual receipt for the takeout. Waylon swallows and shut his eyes tightly again, imagining strong arms wrapped around his middle. The humming he heard in and out of the vocational block, as saccharine as the rest.

 

He has to go back. Waylon has to go back. He has the excuse to do it, so he must. Right? Lisa won’t mind if her late husband dies. His kids, sweet and young, would never know what happened if Waylon’s wife didn’t want them to. Chicago won’t miss him. His parents, dead and gone, will not think of him from wherever they perch. In Heaven or some other place. The only person who looks for him is Eddie. Eddie wants to see Waylon again. They are on the same plane of existence. Dead, but not gone. Waylon knows he’s gone off the deep end, but there’s a great part of him that also knows he’s right.

 

“Okay. Food, computer. Sleep.” He commands.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Waylon wakes up at six to get on a flight that leaves at eight. The airport isn’t far from his place, and the cab he takes is so quiet he wonders if maybe something’s wrong with his hearing. There are noises from the outside world, but he can tune them out with ease. There may be noises from the driver himself, but whenever Waylon catches his eye in the rearview mirror, he is not saying a word. Only looking, and even that’s fleeting.

 

The airport is not overly crowded. Waylon folds and re-folds his tickets, feeling his pocket for the pills he took with him to pass out on the plane. It’s a short ride, but he can’t stand to be that high up in the air without a fair distraction. The gates close thirty minutes before takeoff.

 

Denver looks like it did when Waylon came here, the first time. He stares into the crowd of people desperate to find their way home or wherever else, and in the throng of bodies he almost thinks he sees Eddie. Smiling that over-large smile and beckoning Waylon forward. Waylon wants to follow where this apparition leads, his bad leg aching to move. But when Waylon blinks, the ghost floats away. He nods and blinks back spontaneous tears. Waylon looks down at his phone to check that the messages he received are still there. He thinks that he should text, now, because he’s rented the car and he’s prepared to drive to Leadville, but it’s what he’ll do in that town that confuses him most.

 

Waylon’s work was as a computer programmer. He mended the Morphogenic Engine, made it so the machine ran perfectly. As far as Waylon knows, Murkoff fell after his news release, which would make the experiments they were desperate to complete failed and terminated. He remembered the reels that ran for months afterward about the horrific reality of psychological treatment under their care, and the inbreeding of terror thereafter for all within the psychiatric field. Like the true constructivists Murkoff pretends to be, they tried to get out on top, refusing culpability under the guise of a rogue operation foisted by the inmates themselves. Waylon remembers laughing about it, but Murkoff got out clean.

 

Somehow, they did.

 

When Waylon’s in the Jeep he rented, he takes out his phone again and presses words into the message bar.

 

**I’m here. What next?**

 

He thinks about how he got to Colorado too fast. But the air smells good and the mountains in the distance make him smile. He murmurs to Lisa about how beautiful everything looks, and how he hadn’t realized it when he first got to Denver. She doesn’t talk back of course, but Waylon thinks it’s enough to be able to say anything at all. It’s a habit he never dropped, after Mount Massive. He tries to keep himself from muttering to her in public, but sometimes it’s subconscious, and sometimes people ask if he’s alright.

 

Waylon starts driving despite not having gotten a response. He’s on the road for what feels like a few minutes before he feels himself drift comfortably back onto 1-70 West. The highway looks the same, but then again all highways look the same to Waylon. Waylon merges again, and then it’s just driving for a long, long time.

 

* * *

 

 

Waylon rolls into town just after midday. His hands are shaking on the wheel, and he can clearly remember that if he drives straight through this little town, the highway will lead him right back to the asylum. There’s a narrow side-street that guides him to a diner, and Waylon parks near a beat-up Toyota. He doesn’t want to get out of the car just yet. Not just yet. If he leaves relative safety, Waylon knows there won’t be any chance to turn back. He hasn’t booked a hotel yet. No one knows him, here, much like no one knew him in Illinois.

 

It would be easy to drive back the way he came. This is why Waylon opens the side door and stumbles out, his eyes squinting against Leadville’s sunny-side-up sun. He orders coffee with several creams and sugars and takes out his phone, checking for messages he still hasn’t received. Waylon is where he needs to be, but he has no more direction.

 

Maybe he should just drive back to the asylum on his own and forget whatever work this stranger has in store for him. Waylon knows where he would go, as soon as he steps foot on the property. Whether it’s protected by the state or not, whether the ruins are watched over by a man with a shotgun, or policemen with warrants and roadblocks, Waylon would find his way back to that gymnasium. Murkoff would need to gun him down to keep him away from the last place he saw Eddie Gluskin. Waylon would need to become a different person all together not to want the closure, or the confinement.

 

He takes measured sips of his coffee and munches idly on the toast he ordered. He watches passers-by steer themselves down the little sidewalk to his right. Waylon promises himself that if he isn’t contacted within the day, he’s going in on his own. That’s the plan. He’ll find a camcorder from the consignment store down the road, and he’ll find a flashlight and batteries and drive. Just drive. Nothing else matters, anymore.

 

Just ‘Massive.

 

Just Eddie.

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to preface this by saying that I don't really know what I'm doing, but I want to try to make a longer, more concise and coherent story this time around. It might not always be on track... but I'm going to try.


End file.
